From http://www.pulseaudio.org/, where I have marked the annoying portion in bold:

Quote:

PulseAudio is an integral part of all relevant modern Linux distributions and used in various mobile devices by multiple vendors.

(Thread marked as solved, even though I'm still annoyed. :-) )

Can someone explain me the differences between ALSA and Pulse Audio?

From Wikipedia:

One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it, including those from processes that attempt to directly access the hardware (like legacy OSS applications). PulseAudio achieves this by providing adapters to applications using other audio systems, like aRts and ESD.

In a typical installation scenario under Linux, the user configures ALSA to use a virtual device provided by PulseAudio. Thus, applications using ALSA will output sound to PulseAudio, which then uses ALSA itself to access the real sound card. PulseAudio also provides its own native interface to applications that want to support PulseAudio directly, as well as a legacy interface for ESD applications, making it suitable as a drop-in replacement for ESD.

For OSS applications, PulseAudio provides the padsp utility, which replaces device files such as /dev/dsp, tricking the applications into believing that they have exclusive control over the sound card. In reality, their output is rerouted through PulseAudio.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped...iki/PulseAudio

1 members found this post helpful.

Maybe things are different now...but I really don't like it when my sound server crashes on me (even ignoring the resource-hogging pointlessness of pulse in the first place). I avoid Pulse like the plague.

I think pulse is useful for some people, there are areas where alsa is lacking (eg network streaming) but I think the approach is fundamentally wrong as it's re-inventing the wheel in many ways, there are already good, mature and feature rich alternative such as Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) available from slackbuilds which provide a less intrusive and less bloated implementation for many of pulses features. That said, alsa configuration can be complex (anyone want to write a .asoundrc from scratch?) so pulse has it's place for distributions which try to please everyone out of the box no matter the cost...

I have a receiver that I connect via USB and here are my options with each respective system:

• alsa: Before I start KDE but after I connect the receiver, rmmod all of the hda modules. If I've forgotten to do that before starting KDE, close X, and do what I just said. (This is just to send any sound to the receiver.)
• pulse: Connect my receiver whenever I want and configure pulse to send e.g. system sounds, Skype, to hda_intel and send e.g. DVD, FlashPlayer, to the receiver.

Pulse was a little simple to get running on Kubuntu, but it seems to be dependency hell on Slackware, much like GTK+. Of course, there's a reason I'm back to Slackware after a year of Kubuntu, though.
Kevin Barry

Yes. Pulseaudio adds latency. It causes your sound to LAG.

I'm not sure why you're not just editing an ~/.asoundrc file to direct audio to the new device. Or why you feel the need to completely close X to unload the HDA sound modules.

gtk+ 1.2 and gtk+ 2.24 come with Slackware, so I'm not sure how that can be considered dependency hell for end-users. Having installed pulseaudio on Slackware, I also don't remember there being all that many dependencies.

KDE prevents the modules from being unloaded. Or maybe it's ALSA. Of course, when I asked about the receiver problem, probably in this forum, no one suggested I edit ~/.asoundrc; thanks for the suggestion!
Kevin Barry

I guess you didn't know that you can just kill the KDE processes that are accessing the /dev/snd/* devices and then unload the modules :-)

Adam

Guess which system doesn't require you to kill any processes to switch between output devices? Anyway, it hadn't occurred to me to lsof | grep /dev/snd/. For the most part I just program and browse, so I'm pretty lazy about creating graceful solutions to stuff like that.
Kevin Barry

I consider the fact that Slackware does not use Pulseaudio to be a massive plus.

I also consider the fact that GSB does not use Pulseadio to be a massive plus.

I hate it too, but I use it on my Slackware 13.37 lol.
It works much better with my bluetooth headset compared to the alsa bluetooth plugin...

It does but the lag is very small, some milliseconds for me.

99% of the time it works fine, but sometimes Amarok doesn't make a sound
and I have to restart it and very very very rare it looks up hogging the cpu -_-